Do you read food labels in the grocery store? Even if you don’t, you’ll want to read Xaq Frohlich’s new book From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age, out from the University of California Press. Starting in the 1930s and progressing to the present, Frohlich, Associate Professor of History of… Read more →
Most people have a small, butterfly-shaped gland in their neck sitting in front of their trachea. I am no longer one of them. Almost seven years ago I had my thyroid surgically removed along with several lymph nodes and (thankfully) all of the cancer that caused unusual swelling in the gland. Realizing that I knew… Read more →
From the first page, it’s clear that Dr. Jessica Cox’s Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain is very personal. Professor Cox, a Reader in English Literature at Brunel University in London, explains that this project came out of her own pregnancy and childbirth experiences. She doesn’t just note this in the… Read more →
We teach our children about the birds and the bees, but for some, this talk is as foreign as the metaphor. Today, as a consequence of the growing awareness, knowledge, and acceptance of the nature of sexuality, recent polls in Gallup estimate that seven percent of the United States population identifies as LGBTQ+. This statistic… Read more →
Many historians, including myself, have told the story of New York City’s Sea View Hospital, a tuberculosis sanatorium that operated from 1913 to 1961. But only now, with the publication of Maria Smilios’s new book, The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis, is a crucial part of Sea View’s… Read more →
“There are some situations where the mother may in fact die along with her child. But—and this is the Catholic perspective—you can’t do evil to bring about good. The end does not justify the means.”[1] These are the chilling words of Rev. John Ehrich, who served as the medical ethics director for the Diocese of… Read more →
In the waning years of the nineteenth century, future doctors kept falling sick. Students at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP) in Philadelphia regularly described the illnesses roiling their ranks. In diaries and other manuscripts relating their classroom triumphs, clinical foibles, and romantic entanglements, students recounted classmates who were wracked with pneumonia or delirious… Read more →
In 2017, the walls of Stockholm’s subway system featured new art: black and white sketches of women participating in different activities, such as ice skating, with visible, red menstrual blood on their underwear. While feminist circles reacted with wide acclaim, the art pieces received mixed responses, both locally and abroad. The right-wing Swedish Democrats have… Read more →